


Gold's Books

by shalako



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past rape/noncon, archie has a not so secret crush, gold has severe dyslexia but loves books, gold is very shy, gold loves to draw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 22:25:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shalako/pseuds/shalako
Summary: Gold is a bookseller. Archie is his most frequent customer.





	Gold's Books

**Author's Note:**

> Clearing out my Google Docs. This is a bit fast-paced and a little disjointed. It's really just a collection of scenes set in the same universe, with not a lot connecting one scene to the next. It's one of my older fics.

Archie can’t think of anything to do when the weekend comes around, since doesn’t really go to bars or clubs, just stays at home and reads a book. On Saturdays he towers over other people and walks down to the bookstore, which is big but dark and dusty. He loves it.

The door opens. There’s no bell hung over it to announce his presence, but it isn’t really needed. The bookseller never seems to care when people come and go, and that’s precisely why Archie comes and goes so frequently. He’s sure that Mr. Gold must know Archie doesn’t have the time to read all the books he buys, but the other man never says a word about it, and why should he? He’s selling books. What does it matter to him if people never finish the ones they take away?

He stands behind the counter now, back straight and head bowed as he looks down at a paper napkin he’s busy scribbling on, his hair hanging in his eyes. Archie passes by and smiles and says hi, as he always does, but he only barely sees Mr. Gold’s lips move with the quiet murmur of a hello. When another customer comes in and greets the bookseller, even louder, Mr. Gold doesn’t bother to mouth a response, only stares down at his napkin in distaste.

Mr. Gold is a private man; he doesn’t speak to customers and they don’t speak to him. Some people like it that way; Archie finds it almost unsettling. He’s heard Mr. Gold speak, once or twice before -- in a year or so of knowing him, only twice. The first time was startling, because Archie had known it was only he and Mr. Gold inside the bookstore, and he hadn’t recognized the voice that started speaking. Smooth, deep, thickly Scottish.

“Hello,” said the voice, startlingly clear in the bookshop silence. Archie had jumped, tiptoed to the end of the aisle, poked his head out. He saw Mr. Gold standing with a telephone at his ear, fingers of one hand drumming on the flat surface of the counter.

“It is,” said Mr. Gold. He listened, dragged the inventory closer to him, flicked lazily through the pages. “Paul Celan,” he said, “ _ Selected Poems and Prose _ . Yes, it’s in stock.”

He pushed the inventory away again, leaned on his elbows with a silent sigh and the phone still at his ear.

“‘Till six,” he said, and then, “Of course. Have a nice day.”

He put the phone away, rubbed his neck, looked up and caught Archie staring at him. Face blank, Mr. Gold held his gaze until Archie looked away.

Archie remembers this and the one other incident -- another, more personal phone call he hadn’t been meant to overhear -- and shuffles through the bookstore for the poetry aisle. It’s vast and filled with a variety of books, some thick but most of them small, and he’s never sure whether he should read a few pages before buying or if it’s more fun to be surprised. He picks out two and carries them to the front, places them on the counter, where Mr. Gold flips the napkin over before looking up at him. Mr. Gold is shorter than Archie by about a foot, slender enough for Archie to lift him off the ground with ease, if ever he wanted to, but his face is always blank, always uninviting.

He checks the prices on the book and with one long ink-stained finger, punches them into a calculator.

“Eight ninety-five,” he says, low but clear. Archie hands him a ten-dollar bill and receives his change and receipt graciously. The paper bag that Mr. Gold slips the books into makes no sound in the bookseller’s hands, but it’s noisy as hell in Archie’s. He wonders how that’s possible.

“Can I ask you something?” Archie says, his tone nothing if not friendly, the question surprising even him. Mr. Gold looks puzzled by it, but he nods. “What do you do in your spare time?”

Mr. Gold’s eyebrows quirk together; people must not make small talk with him very often. Although Archie admits, this is kind of a weird question. Gold’s right hand twitches, bringing Archie’s attention back down to the napkin. The side that faces up is blank.

“I go for walks sometimes,” he says, and visibly hesitates before saying the next words. “Sometimes I draw.”

Archie points down to the napkin, his eyebrows raised. “Is that a drawing?”

Shoulders hunched and head bowed, Mr. Gold nods.

“Can I see it?” Archie asks. He’s endeared at the sudden shyness and keeps his eyes on Mr. Gold, waiting for an assent. When the other man ventures to look up, he averts his eyes immediately and, biting his lip, turns the napkin over.

There’s a sketch of a man with curly hair and glasses staring up at Archie, rendered in black ink. It takes Archie a moment to realize why the man looks so familiar, his mind not quite processing the image. Then Mr. Gold flips it over again, his cheeks tinged with pink.

“Well, look,” he says irritably, “if I knew someone was gonna be  _ looking _ at it, I’d have done a fucking landscape, OK?”

“It’s cute,” says Archie, trying to hold back a smile. He fails miserably and earns an exasperated glare. “And very good -- do you draw a lot?”

Mr. Gold sweeps the napkin off the counter, stuffs it in a drawer. “No,” he says firmly. Archie smiles again. He can’t help it.

“You should,” he says.

* * *

Archie’s sitting on the couch and Mr. Gold walks in with a feather duster, eyes Archie’s feet resting on the coffee table, ignores it wrathfully and sets about dusting Archie’s living room. Archie doesn’t comment; he sits with a folder full of paintings, portraits, doodles. They’ve been folded, they’ve been bent and creased and torn, they’ve all been scribbled quickly on notebook paper or the backs of flyers or anything else Mr. Gold happened to have on hand. There’s a tremendous lack of care put into their preservation and it contrasts with the details in the drawings, the tiny geometric shapes that make up bigger ones that all connect together to make a tiger or a human or a bear.

“You don’t like them very much, do you,” Archie notes as he flips through the papers. Mr. Gold pauses in the middle of wiping down the TV, his head cocked.

“My drawings?” he asks, looking over his shoulder at Archie. Archie nods. “Of course I like them,” Mr. Gold says. “If I didn’t, I’d throw them away.”

Archie digs a tiny portrait, all in miniature, out of the bottom of the folder. The drawing is wrinkled and bent by time, by the weight of bigger drawings on top of it.

“So why do you treat them like this?” Archie asks. He holds a few sheets of paper up for Mr. Gold to see. “Don’t most artists try and preserve their drawings? Spray stuff on them to make em stay the way they are, and put them in plastic, hang em on walls?”

Mr. Gold stands with the feather duster hanging limply from one hand and a Lysol-soaked rag in the other. “I suppose,” he says.

“Well, why don’t  _ you _ ?”

The feathers twitch a little; Mr. Gold’s lips part, a hesitating sigh.

“Well,” he says, eyes on the ceiling, “one day, when I was a kid, I drew this picture … of a fish, you know, nothing amazing. But my da saw it, and he liked it, so he asked if he could have it. I didn’t want him to take it, but I said yes -- I don’t really know why -- and after he left, I rather resented him for it. And I didn’t like the fact that I resented him for something like that.” He brings his gaze back down, flat and expressionless. “So I gathered all the drawings that I liked and cut them up and drew over them with other things. Threw them away. Burned them. And since then, I guess I haven’t really treasured them the way I used to.”

He shrugs a little but doesn’t turn back to his cleaning.

“Your parents are divorced?” Archie guesses. Mr. Gold shifts his weight, leaning on his right leg.

“They’re dead,” he says. Archie lets that sink in, searches Mr. Gold for any sign that the deaths were recent -- nothing but blankness there -- and then nods his head.

“But when you were a kid,” he persists. “You said your dad left with the drawing.”

“Oh,” says Mr. Gold. “Yeah, he left.”

“He left …?”

Mr. Gold nods and shrugs at the same time and finally, looking unspeakably uncomfortable, turns away. He speaks with his back to Archie, voice casual and toneless.

“Yeah, he left. My mother, she died when I was three. So, ah, when Da left there wasn’t really anything to do about it. I kept living on the streets for a while, ‘till someone asked me where my parents were. Then they put me in a home.”

Archie’s hands are clasped together, his mouth struggling for words. “On the streets,” he repeats.

“Glasgow,” says Mr. Gold with the sound of a smile. “It’s an interesting place to be a kid.”

Archie can feel his own face crease with distress, feels his heart twist at the flippancy. “Don’t talk like that,” he says from the couch. “You don’t have to joke about it to make me comfortable. If it upsets you, you’re allowed to be upset.”

He can sense the discomfort in the air even before Mr. Gold says, voice cool, “Do I seem like I’m upset?”

“No,” says Archie. “That’s what worries me.”

He watches, silent, as Mr. Gold continues to dust. Then the other man’s hands still and his shoulders lose their tension. He stares down at the surface of the blank TV.

“We don’t know each other well enough for this, Dr. Hopper,” he says, quiet and subdued. “If you want to have a heart-to-heart, you can find somebody else.”

He pushes away, leaves the room without looking at Archie once, and Archie can hear him putting all the cleaning supplies away. Archie doesn’t get up from the couch; he stays there with his hands folded in his lap and lets Mr. Gold leave.

The other man is right. Archie doesn’t even know his first name.

* * *

They kiss for the first time in the bookshop and Mr. Gold pulls away because he doesn’t want a customer to come in unexpectedly and see. But he’s grinning, grinning wide, and Archie is glad. He doesn’t see enough full smiles on his boyfriend’s face; he never knew until today that Mr. Gold has dimples, and in such a narrow face, they look like the most distinctive thing he’s ever seen.

“Come over tonight,” he says. “We’ll watch a movie. And eat together. It’ll be fun.”

Mr. Gold hardly seems convinced that it will be, but he agrees, and when he comes over he sits at the far side of the couch, prim and straight-backed and elegant, too far away to touch.

Everyone has different levels of comfort, Archie supposes, and not everyone is a cuddler. Still, he wishes Gold would sit a little closer. And at night, when they finally start having sex, he wishes sometimes that Gold wouldn’t sleep so far away, wouldn’t be so rigid when he slept, wouldn’t lay there stiffly until morning like he’s too afraid to budge an inch.

But he likes Gold so much it aches, even when the other man is glaring, even when he’s saying scathing things, when he’s sarcastic or unsmiling or grumpy or rude (and that is much of the time). Gold acts like that with everyone, but it’s only Archie who can make the bad temper disappear, if only for a moment. He knows how to deal with Gold, and so he lays awake in bed at night and comforts himself with his privileged knowledge, the only thing that really truly sets him apart.

He knows that Gold’s right leg is scarred from thigh to ankle, though he doesn’t know why, and he knows that it aches especially on rainy days, or when he’s walked too much, or when he walks on it wrong. He knows that Gold doesn’t sleep well, that he’s grumpy most of the time because he’s so damn tired, and that the only way to convince him to go to sleep when he’s exhausted is to trick him. You turn the heat up when he’s sitting on the couch, you massage his leg ‘till he’s relaxed and when his eyelids are drooping, you swing his legs up on the couch so that his back slides down and within moments, he’s asleep.

He knows that if Gold finds a reason to touch your arm or hand or shoulder, it means he wants a hug, and if you fall asleep before him you just might wake up when he pulls your arm around him to be cuddled. Archie knows that nothing gets Gold angrier than deliberate dirtiness, that few things can incite his wrath like food-stained dishes left in the sink. He knows that Gold isn’t really paying attention when his eyes are glued to the TV screen; his mind is far away, and if you ask him about the plot he won’t be able to tell you anything.

He knows that Gold, for all his books and all his quiet knowledge, has trouble reading and an even harder time with spelling. And he knows how embarrassing that is for Gold, so he doesn’t bring it up or point it out again after the first time, when Gold struggles to read aloud a sign that Archie, without his glasses, can’t quite see. 

He knows that he’s more than a little bit in love.

* * *

“Do you have a moment?”

Archie jolts; he hadn’t noticed the hand on his shoulder ‘till Gold spoke. The other man moves around in front of Archie, sits down at the kitchen table with a book in his hands, the cover turned toward his chest so Archie can’t see.

“What’s up?” Archie says. There’s hesitation written over Gold’s face.

“I need your help with something,” he says, and one hand comes off the book, reaches out almost all the way across the table before he catches himself and pulls it back again. “With a book. There’s a word I don’t know. And I tried to look it up, but it didn’t work.”

Archie has seen Gold looking up words before -- usually when the other man thought no one was watching -- and it doesn’t really surprise him that the dictionary afforded no results. He has a brief vision of Gold hunched in front of the computer, laboriously typing in letter after letter, checking the book to make sure each one is right and still somehow spelling it completely wrong.

Gold won’t quite look him in the eye.

“You have to promise me,” he says, the words coming out slowly, painfully, “that you won’t make fun of me. For what I’m reading. Or ask me questions. I just want to know what the word means.”

Archie nods. He watches as Gold’s grip loosens gradually on the book, and he opens it up, sets it down in front of Archie. A single word is highlighted in the middle of page 53.

“Dissociation,” Archie reads. He looks up, tries to interpret the look on Gold’s face. There’s nothing but blankness there, so Archie looks back down and finds the top of the page, where the title of the book is written in italics on one side and the title of the chapter is written on the other. His heart constricts with an ache, suddenly too heavy for his chest. His gaze shoots back up to Gold again.

“What does it mean?” Gold asks. His eyes flicker over Archie’s face and he seems to catch on to the expression there; his own face crumples in dismay. “I told you. You can’t ask any questions. And you can’t make fun.”

“All right,” says Archie. His voice is a painful whisper. He clears his throat, reads a few paragraphs of the book, tries to think of a good way to sum up what he’s read. “Dissociation. It’s when you disconnect with reality. The book says that, uh, when little kids get … hurt … they might dissociate to protect themselves … but then when they get older they can’t stop doing it, even though they’re not in danger anymore.” He looks at the ceiling, trying to remember some real-life examples from his previous patients. “So, for instance, they might cry during a sad movie but they’re dissociating, so they don’t feel any of the sadness that’s making them cry. Or they might have really angry outbursts without knowing why, or even feeling angry. They disconnect their actions from their feelings because they never learned a better way to deal with pain.”

There’s silence in the room. Gold’s eyes are turned away and glazed over, reflective. Archie takes a deep breath, closes the book, slides it back across the table. The title glares up at him:  _ Life After Childhood Sexual Abuse _ . A self-help book, not the kind of thing he’d ever have guessed Gold would own. Then again, this is a chapter of Gold’s life he had no clue about until today.

“Thank you,” says Gold, snapping Archie back to the present. His fingers brush Archie’s hand and then pull away as he gathers his book and stands. Archie stands too, without thinking, and then his arms are wrapped around Gold and he can feel the book digging into his side as Gold awkwardly tries to hug him back.

“Thank you for telling me,” Archie whispers. He feels Gold tense for a moment before relaxing just enough to make the hug more bearable.

“I didn’t tell you anything,” Gold says, voice muffled. “You read the fucking title of the book. You ass.”

“Sorry.”

Gold sighs. “It’s fine. I …” He shifts uncomfortably, but doesn’t break the hug; Archie can feel heat emanating from Gold’s face. “I would have … told you, eventually. I just …”

“Don’t worry about it,” Archie says. “I’m not mad or anything. I’m just glad I know.”

The hug lasts another thirty seconds, delightfully long, before Gold nods and pulls away.


End file.
